Left-Brahmin, Right-Bahujan

The Left needs to shrug its Left-Brahmin configuration to emerge with newer forms of solidarity

- Ajay Gudavarthy

LEFT politics, for some time now, has been witnessing a terminal decline.

There is a growing concern in university spaces that Left politics may end up attracting only the social elite, and those they are attempting to mobilise may move to the Right. It is a new political configuration that I refer to as Left-Brahmin, Right-Bahujan. The imagination of the Left has, over a period, been getting eroded in terms of its appeal and jouissance. Those who it was mobilising seem to be operating on a different register. It is a conflict between idealism and pragmatism, ideology and strategy, structural change and immediate survival. But what has changed so fundamentally?

What has changed fundamentally is the way transformation is being imagined after the neoliberal era. Farmer movements in the recent past have been a great exception in bringing back street protests in a big way. Farmer protests succeeded in pushing back the farm laws, but they did not succeed in electorally defeating the current political regime. It is in this context, some may argue, that farmers protested against the farm laws and not for the political defeat of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). They may protest at Delhi's borders, but may go back to voting for the BJP and Narendra Modi. Defeating the entire corporate model of development was never their intention; it was only about saving their land.